Hacking for fun and profit

The Apache HTTP server is by far the most used web server in the world. It is an excellent, feature packed and standards compliant web server. Extremely configurable, with an endless amount of modules, superb documentation and, due to its license, is being used commercially by companies like Oracle. There is only a small problem with Apache: It’s not the fastest server around. This is because historically, Apache’s priorities have been correctness and configurability, not performance. Correctness and configurability are the reasons why Apache powers almost 70% of the web today, but still, Apache has a big, fat ass (we are talking about system resources here).

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It has been more than a month since I blogged about Django, the “Web Framework for perfectionists with deadlines”, and the more I use it, the more I know it is the right choice for my web development needs. There is a lot of activity in the project’s trac (this is more important IMHO than activity in the mailing lists ;-)

Some of the big improvements in the last weeks are:

• Internationalization support: both in code and templates.using gettext under the hood.
• A release: Django 0.9 was released this month, this should help people without subversion (or people that don’t know how to use it) installing django.
• More documentation: The documentation has been extended and improved. It is still incomplete, but it is of extremely high quality, probably one of the open source projects with the nicest documentation I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot.
• RSS/Atom syndication framework: “Man, it’s so easy it probably shouldn’t even be legal.”
• Pretty error pages: So pretty that now it is nice to have errors in your code ;-)

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It has been more than two months since I blogged for the last time. There has been a lot of things going on. The big thing is that now I am working full time in my own business: Aureal Systems, a consulting company in Peru. I’m working here with Breno, Benji, Fernando, Nestor and Nicolas (and Javier and Jackson, but they don’t have websites AFAIK). We have a month in our new (bigger and nicer) headquarters and now I have my own office. It is a mess of course (our OpenBSD router, Forlorn, is in my closet) but at least I can close the door and listen to Ludwig Van.

Aureal Systems specializes in secure computing. Everything we do is with security in mind, from (*NIX/Linux/BSD) server deployment to development. And since we specialize in security, we are listed in OpenBSD’s Support and Consulting site.

Business is going very well, a lot better than we expected actually, and that means lots of work, which I love of course :) I miss my son every time I have to stay in one of those (very frequent) all night long hack-a-thons, but it is for the best. As the title of this post say, Aureal is “A New Hope”. We are growing fast, sometimes too fast, but our customers are all very satisfied with our work

You can expect more activity in this blog for now on.

This has been one busy week. I had a hard drive crash in my job’s desktop box, a bad one. The hard drive is a new one, a 120GB Seagate disc, but the hard drive fan that came with it was defective.

I used Ubuntu Live to reiserfsck the damn thing. Everything was so messed up that I had to –rebuild-sb and –rebuild-tree in my data partitions. I lost GigaBytes of data but, lucky for me, nothing critical. Now all my filesystems are XFS, except for a small 30MB /boot ext3 partition for grub compatibility. God (Cthulhu) bless free software and CHOICE.

Now, the chicha-event of the month, Manuel came to Peru. It was a very short, family-oriented visit, but at least he was present in Nestor’s bithday last Friday. I was there with Rita so finally (almost) everybody met her :-)

He came with a great present:

Since I love british humor, I am a big fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Douglas Adams. And a copy of the Ultimate Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the perfect gift for a nerd like me.

The next day we went to a chinese restaurant and we had an excelent time :-) You can see the mandatory pics in Manuel’s gallery.

Now he is back in New Orleans with Melissa. He’ll probably be back here again in February.

I’m in the middle of a 2 day long hackathon with breno. I’ll blog about this later, but now I want to talk about an amazing peruvian powerdrink called Vortex. Try it, i’ve been drinking RedBull and coffee and I was falling asleep here. Two slurps of Vortex and I’m a hacking machine again.

It is a mixture of coca leaf, caffeine, taurine and guarana. Dynamite in a bottle.